This article in the Northwest Florida Daily News highlights a program to help schools teach math and science.
With academic standards changing every year, it can be difficult for teachers and administrators to keep pace.
Principals across Okaloosa County are joining 600 school administrators from throughout Florida in a yearlong professional development course aimed at building standard-based curriculums and improving students’ academic achievement in math and science.
The Partnership to Rejuvenate and Optimize Mathematics and Science Education (PROMiSE) recently has been introduced in Florida. The three-year initiative is supported with federal funding from the Math and Science Partnership program at the U.S. Department of Education.
Here’s the website for Florida PROMiSE if you want to learn more.
Meanwhile, in higher education there is a push to produce better math and science teachers out of colleges. The St. Petersburg Times Gradebook blog mentions FSU joining up with the Science and Mathematics Teacher Imperative.
Florida State University is among more than 75 public colleges and universities that have joined forces to increase the number of math and science teachers in public schools.
The newly formed Science and Mathematics Teacher Imperative hopes to address what some have seen as a tendency among top public universities to shortchange teacher education in favor of lucrative research and grants.
And finally, Dr. Harry Kroto is getting the word out on a project he’s been working on for a while now called Global Educational Outreach. There are two sites you can visit to get a feel for what Dr. Kroto is trying to do: GEOSET and Kroto Research Insititute.
The ultimate aim of GEOSET is the empowerment of teachers by giving them, wherever they are, access to educational materials of the highest possible quality plus presentation instruction by the best communicators, free-of-charge. This will enable them to teach essential concepts, introduce students to science at the cutting edge and encourage the students to consider seriously careers in STEM.
